Coffee & Swiping: W/E July 2, 2017

(Coffee & Swiping is a weekly news-y/blogg-y article about the past week’s news/drama in the mobile gaming industry. It’s basically an excuse for Noen to ramble on about anything and everything that has to do with nothing.)

Gooooood Morning SNAPP Family and welcome to the start of another hot and steamy work week! It’s the first week of July already and the weather is hot, but my hairy man body is even hotter! We’ve got a lot to talk about, so fire up those coffee makers or since it’s so hot outside, head to that fancy coffee house on the corner and get yourself one of those grande mocha frappa latte caramel drizzle unicorn fart ice coffees for 50 bucks. (I can’t hate on anyone. I do like me a frozen mocha frappuccinos once in a great while.)

Well, it’s Monday again in the mobile gaming world. I hope everyone had a great weekend. As for me, things have been pretty good. I’m still doing great with quitting smoking and the whole vaping thing. (Averaging a couple cigarettes a day compared to a pack a day before.) Things are starting to taste different, I have more energy. Crazy stuff I tell ya! Crazy stuff indeed!

I’m finally getting things settled back at home after the vacation and the kids being home for the summer. So, starting today, I’ll be back doing SNAPPZILLA full-time again. It’s tough when you work from home and have a set routine going and have to change everything all the sudden. I think I have all the kinks worked out now, so things should be back to “normal” this week at SNAPPZILLA.

Before I get into anything, I have two quick things. First one is that we have a new SNAPPlogo high atop of the website! This one was created by the indie developer (Thomas Young) behind the newly released iOS gem, Fowlst. We absolutely love the logo and we love Fowlst even more. I highly recommend this game. The second thing I’d like to draw your eyes to is this week’s Coffee & Swiping sketch by “The Great One” Laszlo. This one is based off of the iOS game, Hyper Beam (by Rinikulous Games) due to James and I having “The Official SNAPP Challenge Extravaganza Y2K”. Even though the challenge is over (James kicked my ass!), it’s memory still lives on this week with this image. Starting today, indie artist, Laszlo will give us a new C&S sketch based off of one of the mobile games that released that week. I love Laszlo’s work, so I’m really excited about this. And I couldn’t be happier with this sketch.

Alright. Enough about SNAPPZILLA…..

Sooooo, what’s been going on the last 7 days in the mobile game industry? I’ll tell ya, lots! Well, nothing compares to the news that a Desperate Housewives game released on the App Store this week, but I’ll try and make some other things sound almost as important.

One of the bigger bits of news is that Colin Lane and Brad Erkkila’s new game, Touchdowners hit ONE MILLION downloads in ONE FUCKING WEEK! That’s so awesome. Both developers have been big supporters of SNAPPZILLA and we couldn’t be more proud of them for hitting this goal. Congrats guys! We love your indie faces!

Another big thing last week was that Apple removed around 58,000 apps for the Chinese App Store due to lack of compatibility with the whole 32 bit thing with iOS 11 drawing near. I don’t really want to get into this here in Coffee & Swiping because we will be here all day. All that I’m going to say is that I’m not happy about it and I really hope Apple can come up with something. There are a lot of great indie games that we are going to lose with this update. If you have an old iPhone or iPod Touch, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to download some of these games that you know will be pulled from the App Store if you don’t want to lose them. I did the same thing years ago and I have a couple iPod Touch 4G’s chock full of super old games that still work to this day.

Let’s see. Well, Ubisoft soft launched their new strategy town builder RPG thingy, Assassins Creed: Rebellion in the PH App Store. I just started playing it late last night, so I still don’t really know all the ins and outs of the game yet, but so far it’s kind of a cool mashup of strategy, RPG, and a pinch of base building like Fallout Shelter. Of course, it has the usual trappings you’ve come to expect with these high profile F2P games. Multiple currency, resource collecting, random drops, etc. I will say that the 45 minutes or so that I played last night was pretty fun. I’ll dig into it a little more today and let you know if it’s worth your time.

Another one that just soft launched on the PH App Store is Torchlight: The Legend Continues. I haven’t had a chance to download this one yet, but I try and dig into it a little this week. I know a lot of people have been waiting for a Torchlight mobile game to release.

Other than that, we had a bunch of big updates last week. Rocketcat released the big COCCYX update for Death Road to Canada with a TON of new stuff like new characters and a whole new unlock system. There was also the Season 2 update for Tennis Champs Returns with all new characters and customizations. If that wasn’t enough, Vector 2 got a big update, Guns of Mercy got a second campaign, Crash Club got a Galactic Emergency, Gangstar New Orleans is racing toward the White House, and OK Golf headed to England. And of course, there are tons of “4th of July/Independence Day updates popping up everywhere as we speak.

Now, seeing how I’m starting to ramble on per usual. I’m going to cut out what games I played throughout the week. I’ll try and review some of them over the next couple days regardless. Like I said, I’m back full-time now. So, expect highly mediocre things from now on!

Have a great week everyone and have a safe 4th of July/Independence Day! Don’t lose any fingers lighting fireworks. You need those for gaming and scratching your ass! Until next week, keep it stiff and keep on swiping………